NEW DELHI: Poverty forced Shazia* to drop out of school almost six years back. Before the lockdown came into effect, the 15-year-old girl was diagnosed with blood cancer.
In between her treatment, Shazia got no relief from cutting threads of jeans -- the primary mode of income that supports her family. Finalizing one pair of jeans fetches 60 paise. The cramped room in northeast Delhi’s Kailash Nagar which Shazia shares with her parents and siblings also doubles as their ‘workspace’.
Asked how she managed to cut threads with her deteriorating health condition, the teenager she said she ‘had to manage it somehow’. “Finalising 100 pairs of jeans takes around two hours,” she added as her mother Salma removed piles of jeans to make space for seating.
“The entire family is engaged in it. It is not an option for any of us to not do it. Despite her health condition, she helps us out as our hands are tied. The lockdown has further pushed us to the corner,” said Salma.
While the family with five members engaged in it managed to earn till Rs 8,000 under normal circumstances, work is sparse now. “We are barely making Rs 3,000 a month. It depends on the number of garments we receive which varies from one to the other,” Salma added.
Shazia is among thousands of other children who are engaged in the home-based garment industry in the national capital. According to a 2015 Save The Children report, child labor in the garment industry is one of the rapidly growing unorganized workforces in cities. The pandemic may push these families further to the margins, said, experts.
The survey which was conducted across five districts and 14 locations in Delhi showed that over 8,000 children were engaged in garment-related activities spread over five districts. Sixty-nine percent of those working with their family members were girls, the survey documented.
The Census 2011 data said there were over 10 million child laborers in India.
The Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Amendment Act, 2016, bans children below the age of 14 years to work except from working in a family business or as a child artist. Under the Right to Education Act, it is mandatory to provide free and compulsory education to all children between six to 14 years.
Prabhat Kumar, deputy director - child protection, Save the Children pointed out early education remained a neglected area with parents often questioning if things would improve for the family if children went to schools.
Families often turn to children in households when they need more income. Such trends have been noticed in India, said a recent report ‘COVID-19 and Child Labour: A time of crisis, a time to act’ by UNICEF and ILO.
When Khalik Ahmed lost three fingers in an accident, the immediate fallout was his children dropping out of school and the entire family turning to thread cutting of jeans. The rate per jeans varies between Re 1 and Rs 1.50.
Busy with a fresh lot of garments that arrived a day before, his wife Reshma Begum said, “How can we afford children going to schools? It is necessary that they help us with the family having no form of livelihood to fall back on.”
Currently, a local NGO is trying to re-enrol two of their children in a school.
Pandemic and Distance Learning
In the adjoining Ajeet Nagar, Santosh Kumar*, 15, could not attend classes for almost a month now because his phone was not working. With dwindling funds to run households, recharges are difficult too, he added. Instead, he has been investing time to put buttons in jeans when they receive them in lots.
“I do not remember really since when I am working...maybe since I was 8 or 9 years old. Some day, I will do a degree in tourism,” said Kumar.
Over 80 percent of parents whose children studied in government schools said education was not delivered during the lockdown, showed a recent rapid assessment survey conducted by OXFAM across five states. Lack of devices to access education posed as a major hindrance for children, it said.
The New Education Policy 2020 has not addressed how resilient education should be part of the new system, said Kamal Gaur, deputy director - education at Save the Children.
“In a prolonged emergency like COVID-19, it was expected that there would be some kind of plan in the NEP. However, I do not see that figuring anywhere in the policy,” Gaur said.
Amid the pandemic, children may be pushed further to the fringes and be forced to drop out of education. The lack of distance-learning solutions in many countries could increase child labor numbers, according to the ILO.
A few houses away, Ruksana*, 17 and Arshi*,16 talks about their struggles of juggling education and doing mirror work on womenswear. The duo has been at this work for the last seven and six years respectively.
“Even in usual times, it is difficult to focus on education with the pile of mirror work. Balancing education with this work is extremely challenging,” said Ruksana.
“We suffer from back pain due to the long hours we put in this work and our eyes water constantly having to focus on the mirror work,” said Arshi.
The duo said they aspired to lead ‘normal’ lives like other children at their school who can focus only on their education and do not need to supplement the family income. “We want to be trained as beauticians someday and leave this work behind,” said Ruksana.
Pandemic and child labor
The UNICEF had said the pandemic can potentially reverse the positive trends which were recorded in curbing child labor.
“Families are struggling for livelihood. Unless there are sound social protection schemes, households will find it increasingly difficult to put children back to schools and children will find it difficult to be in schools. The present work may not be an indication because there is not that much work available for household units. Children who were previously not involved in home-based work may also be involved in the coming time,” said labour economist Ravi Srivastava.
Dhananjay Tingal, executive director of Bachpan Bachao Andolan, said there is a worry that trafficking would go up.
“We have rescued around 100 children from the sweatshops in the garment industry in Rajasthan, Gujarat and Delhi recently. People have taken loans amid the lockdown to make ends meet so we presume trafficking will increase,” said Tingal.
The government needs to immediately address the existing policy gap in rehabilitating children, he said.
The ILO said an estimated 42-66 million children due to the crisis emerging from the pandemic.
The enforcement mechanism is not effective in regulating child labor especially when it comes to the home-based industry. “The garment industry is mostly a home-based industry. In the unlock phase, in order to increase the number of hands to complete orders, more children may have been employed within the household unit,” said Rahul Suresh Sapkal, assistant professor at Centre for Labour Studies, School of Management and Labour Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences.